The government?s decision to appoint an eight-member independent committee under the chairmanship of Deepak Parekh to comment on the draft guidelines of the ambitious Rajiv Awas Yojana (RAY) shows that it is taking the goal of a slum-free India within five years seriously. The appointment of this committee comes soon after finance minister Pranab Mukherjee made a 700% hike in allocation towards RAY in his Budget speech. Deepak Parekh and co are expected to suggest appropriate strategies, financial and others, to make RAY implementable. The key to slum redevelopment and rehabilitation is according property rights to slum dwellers. However, there are two tricky issues which make this more difficult than it sounds. In an interview to The
Financial Express last month, the Peruvian economist and property rights expert Hernando de Soto had said that it is wrong to look at slum redevelopment and rehabilitation as simply a housing problem. Because for many slum dwellers, the slum isn?t just a house but often also a small factory, warehouse and shop. Unless a slum dweller is accorded property rights in this broad sense (rather than simply housing rights), slum rehabilitation will be a difficult exercise and run into resistance.
That conceptual problem aside, there is a real problem in deciding cut-off dates. There is a need to balance the interests of people who have lived in a slum for long and those who are recent squatters hoping to be assigned property rights. This is a tricky issue and perhaps one that the Deepak Parekh committee ought to mull over carefully. Of course, the more fundamental question to be asked is why people choose to live this way in the first place? Surely, if they had a choice, they would not. And that leads to the bigger issue of providing affordable housing to the poor. There are a couple of schemes for affordable housing under the JNNURM, which may be merged with RAY. There is also the possibility of merging the interest subsidy scheme for housing for the urban poor with RAY. But the government needs to think beyond specific schemes about how to increase the supply of affordable housing, built either by the private sector or public private partnerships. There is also the question of the availability of finance. At the moment, it is difficult even for a middle class person to get a sizeable home loan at less than double digit rates of interest. Hopefully, Deepak Parekh and co, apart from the specifics on RAY, will also be able to impress this larger issue on the government.